"We can't find any candidates" is one of the most common phrases in the field of personnel selection. This is the most common obstacle encountered during the selection process: to fill a vacancy, companies tend to look for someone from the same sector, in the same position, who performs the same tasks and whose gross annual salary is in line with the budget. Essentially, the aim is to attract a candidate who is able to move from a competitor to the organization and start work immediately, without training. This is an understandable desire and, if it were achievable, it would be the perfect scenario. However, careers do not progress in a linear fashion, and skills are not what we think they are. The big misunderstanding arises with regard to skills, which are generally divided into hard and soft, summarized as follows:
Technical skills: these are skills that can be learned, they are specific to a profession, and they can be quantified and measured.
Soft skills: they can be defined as social skills, are often innate, and are transferable from one profession to another.
Many believe that soft skills are secondary, less important, a bonus to have, and that they are not actually the focus of recruitment. However, the opposite is true: first of all, soft skills cannot be learned quickly, while hard skills are learned on the job and can potentially be acquired every time you change jobs. Secondly, soft skills are transferable from one sector to another. A classic example is the skills required for sales roles, which are transferable from one product to another.
For these reasons, there is increasing talk of two processes that will change the world of work: reskilling and upskilling. Let's take a closer look at them:
What is reskilling? It is a path that leads to the acquisition of new skills that enable a professional figure to take on a different role within the organization in which they work.
What is upskilling? Upskilling, on the other hand, is the training process that leads a worker to expand the skills related to their role.
In light of this, rigidity in the design phase of a position—and therefore in the selection process—is counterproductive. This happens because everyone is convinced that their business has unique, "technical" characteristics that make it difficult to identify a candidate and too costly to train and accompany them as they join the company, so there is a tendency to think that the person chosen must be ready to work. While it is true that every business has its complexities, this does not mean that we should believe that there are no profiles outside of a rigid job description capable of filling a specific role. The learning process is part of everyone's career. Trusting in potential means leaving room for a professional to develop and, why not, letting them surprise us by exceeding our expectations.
This rigid approach is what often makes the Italian job market so formulaic and inflexible, making it difficult for cross-functional careers and non-linear paths to flourish, which would often create interesting and highly adaptable professionals.
So what can we do to break this rigid pattern? Here are three concrete actions:
- Identify potential: when analyzing a profile, it is necessary to identify the transferable skills, separating them from the "theoretical" side of the profile. When we meet a candidate, we should try to test their abilities rather than their knowledge of the sector. Everything can be learned, but not aptitude, i.e., true talent.
- Look at career paths in perspective: rather than asking "where do you see yourself in five years," recruiters should try to imagine where the candidate will be tomorrow. Where they started and where they are going are two pieces of information that can tell us a lot about whether or not to select them.
- Training: what is lacking can almost always be compensated for, except for soft skills. Let's ask ourselves what we can transfer to a profile in terms of training and what will happen from that moment on in terms of performance.